A continually increasing trend facing service providers of voice and communication networks is the seemingly endless level of bandwidth required by consumers and content providers. Consumers utilize devices such as mobile phones, tablets, computers, etc. to obtain various types of content. As the number and types of services available over such networks increases, consumer demand for access to such services also increases. Consumer demand for such services can often require greater bandwidth and a higher quality of service than only a short period of time prior.
For example, mobile phones are no longer used simply for web browsing and light data communications. Consumers often use these devices for video conferencing and real-time massively multiplayer gaming that require a constant exchange of significant amounts of data. Consumers also frequently share videos and images that have increased in size due to improvements in the optical qualities of mobile devices. Many content providers allow consumer to stream the contents of television and sporting events directly to devices such as mobile phones and tablets. It is not uncommon for certain consumers to receive all of their television programming, including on-demand movies, over broadband communication networks.
As consumers continue to increase the amount of information carried over the communication network, various concerns become more apparent. For example, a service provider may face difficulties allocating bandwidth for all the content while maintaining a required quality of service. The manner in which data associated with this content is processed can often have a direct effect on things such as congestion and delays. For example, various networking devices perform data compression in order to improve speed and efficiency. Certain types of consumer content, however, are already compressed prior to transmission. This can often cause delays because the networking device utilizes processing time to compress content which is already in a compressed format. Furthermore, it is possible that further compression by the networking device can result in a negative compression ratio wherein the size of the compressed content is actually greater than the original.
It is not always possible to physically increase bandwidth due to the costs associated with deploying the infrastructure. Service providers, therefore, can face many challenges in attempting to maintain consumer satisfaction with limited network capacity. Based on the foregoing, there is a need for an approach which improves one or more aspects in processing data within a broadband communication network.